It has been 175 since Louis Daguerre introduced photography to the world. The Giroux daguerreotype apparatus is photography’s first camera manufactured in quantity.

On June 22, 1839, L.-J.-M. Daguerre and Isidore Niépce (the son of Daguerre’s deceased partner, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce) signed a contract with Alphonse Giroux (a relative of Daguerre’s wife) granting him the rights to sell the materials and equipment required to produce daguerreotype images.

Scientist and politician François Arago publicly announced the new daguerreotype process in a speech to the French Academy of Art and Sciences on August 19, 1839, and the first advertisement promoting the process appeared in the August 21 issue of La Gazette de France.

Within three short weeks, Giroux met with popular success both in and outside of France; the first export of his company’s cameras arrived in Berlin, Germany, on September 6, 1839.

As part of our studies through the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, I chose to work with the Douglas Fairbanks Nitrate Still Negatives Collection for my personal project. The collection has been mentioned a few times on our blog, most notably in the past month in honor of 90 years since the release of The Thief of Bagdad. The collection comprises nearly 10,000 nitrate still negatives that came from Douglas Fairbanks’ personal collection and were donated to George Eastman House by his son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The still negatives range from his early works such as A Modern Musketeer (1917) and Mr. Fix-It (1918) to most of his well-known works like Robin Hood (1922) and The Black Pirate (1926). The collection features scene stills, character portraits, set designs and many other behind-the-scenes photos.

One of the most interesting titles I have worked with so far is The Gaucho (1927). The title has nearly 1,600 negatives, one of the largest out of the entire collection. The negatives have been wonderfully fascinating to study and work with, as they demonstrate the extensive range of the collection. While the negatives had not been kept in ideal conditions before being donated to Eastman House, the quality of the photos is still quite impressive.

Lupe Velez is love struck by Fairbanks as the Gaucho (understandably so!)

In addition to beautiful shots of scenes from the film, there are a number of stills showing paintings, pages from books, and prints used as reference for the film (much like a modern day photocopier.) The stills show exactly what inspired and guided the costume and set designers for the film. Within these stills are also photographs of the paintings of art director Carl Oscar Borg. Borg was a Swedish painter who also worked as art director on Fairbanks’ previous film, The Black Pirate (1926). The paintings are regrettably only documented in black-and-white, but it is interesting to compare them to scene stills to truly marvel at how well the set designers and decorators were able to capture Borg’s vision.

As noted in The Thief of Bagdad blog post, tests for make-up effects were a must during production. For The Gaucho, they had at least five different versions of make-up for the ‘Victim of the Black Doom,’ yet in the final version of the film his face is never shown!

Processing and scanning of this collection has been ongoing for several years. The scope of my project is to continue inventorying the negatives, re-house them into new archival boxes for storage, create master digital scans of each negative, and perform file maintenance on existing digital files.

These various steps proved to be more challenging than I had originally anticipated. Improvements to the workflow over the course of the project has meant revisiting some of the previous work done with the collection, in order to keep things consistent. What may seem to be simple tasks on the surface are often in actuality very detailed and time-consuming, and one small change can set in motion a whole series of related tasks that need to be applied to the entire collection. While the process has had its challenges, it has been a great experience becoming familiar with rare nitrate stills, Douglas Fairbanks, and the amazing work that went into the making of his spectacular features.

Sophia Lorent is from Madison, Wisconsin and is a current Masters student in the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and at the University of Rochester.

The Freshman comes almost at the tail end of the Dryden’s “Gangsters” series (playing every Thursday in May and June). And it certainly gives a strong wink and a nod to gangster movies, but it also pokes fun at academia, foodies, and a few other things along the way.

Here’s the story: Clark Kellogg, young man from rural Vermont moves to New York City to go to film school. Almost as soon as he sets foot in the city he is suckered out of all of his belongings. When Clark finally chases down the thief, the guy attempts to pay Clark back by offering him a job with his Uncle Carmine and that’s when things really start to get interesting.

There are so many reasons to see The Freshman—not least of which is Marlon Brando, as Carmine Sabatini, parodying his own performance, as Don Vito Corleone, from The Godfather. Brando plays his part with such charm and style that he overcomes the risk of it becoming just a one-dimensional joke. Roger Ebert said, “There have been a lot of movies where stars have repeated the triumphs of their parts—but has any star ever done it more triumphantly than Marlon Brando does in The Freshmen? He is doing a reprise here of his most popular character, Don Vito Corleone of The Godfather, and he does it with such wit, discipline and seriousness that it’s not a rip-off and it’s not a cheap shot, it’s a brilliant comic masterstroke.” Also, in this film, Marlon Brando ice-dances, yes, ice-dances, and it’s lovely.

Not to be outdone is Matthew Broderick, as Clark Kellogg, who plays the perfect straight man whose been thrown into a crazy situation. He is our utterly relatable and reasonable everyman trying desperately to stumble back out of the trouble that he has managed to stumble into and the audience is just happy to be along for the ride. In addition to Brando and Broderick, the cast is rounded out with wonderful character performances by Bruno Kirby, Penelope Ann Miller, Frank Whaley (who sports an epic pompadour), BD Wong, and Paul Benedict.

But, let’s also not forget the komodo dragon which, because komodo dragons are endangered, was actually played by seven water moniters. One of the funniest, and surreal, moments in the film involves Bert Parks serenading the komodo dragon to the tune of “Here she comes Miss America.” It is the endearing characters as well as moments like these that give this film such charm.

The experience of watching a silent film has never been truly noiseless. From the early teens well into the late 1920’s, silent films were almost always projected with some form of musical accompaniment, the nature of which varied according to the individual film and the scope of the theatre and clientele. Special releases premiering in big cities at important theatres were often accompanied by original scores performed by 40-plus piece orchestras, while screenings of the same film in smaller cities and towns might be accompanied by a single musician, usually a piano player or organist, improvising the musical accompaniment. Compiling, not to mention learning, enough appropriate music for countless reels of film was a formidable task that was resolved with two essential documents for the musician: music cue sheets and photoplay music.

Music cue sheets are highly detailed lists of musical suggestions, tailored to the narrative sequencing of a specific film. They were first produced by the Hollywood studios, but were also sold by musical entrepreneurs outside the studio system. Some, such as the “musical synopsis” for Across the Continent, simply listed the names of these musical suggestions along with their proper place in the film. Others, such as the “thematic music cue sheet” for Abraham Lincoln, featured the beginning melody of each suggested piece on a musical staff under the “cue” of an intertitle or action seen on screen.

The second important element, photoplay music, is a sort of umbrella term. It is used to describe a series of compositions or musical arrangements, sometimes original but more often lifted from popular classical melodies, used to accompany a film. Photoplay music includes everything from venue and orchestra specific original scores for larger releases, to musical arrangements simple enough to be played by a single accompanist, but substantial enough to be fleshed out for small ensembles or large orchestras. Cue sheets suggested specific arrangements of photoplay music for a film but it was the conductor or accompanist who ultimately decided which photoplay music to purchase and what to play during the film.

Here at George Eastman House we have a valuable collection of both cue sheets and photoplay music, donated by the estate of the late Theodore Huff, a collector, archivist, professor, biographer, and silent film accompanist. Perhaps even more impressive than the sheer volume of this collection is the intersection between the two elements. An active silent film accompanist and music collector himself, many of Huff’s photoplay music scores correspond directly with the musical suggestions listed on his music cue sheets. And that’s where I come in.

I am a Masters student here at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and the University of Rochester and I have spent the past few months initiating the process of digitizing this important collection. Cue sheets are still used to accompany screenings of silent films, but they are also incredibly useful research tools for archivists and scholars by virtue of their meticulous cataloging of running times, footage counts, projection speed, cues between scenes and more. Take for example the cue sheet for The Famous Mrs. Fair, which on just the first page offers up a wealth of information about the film. This is especially important for lost films for which music cue sheets constitute an important point of access, both in terms of technical specifications and narrative atmosphere as indicated by the musical suggestions, to films we might otherwise know nothing about.

The scope of the current project addresses the collection of music cue sheets for nearly 900 films. Once completed, we hope to continue into a second phase of digitizing over 1,600 pieces of photoplay music – the actual music pieces suggested in the cue sheets – for a comprehensive digital library of silent film music that will be accessible to archivists, scholars, musicians, and others. It’s a daunting but an exciting project and I’m grateful for the opportunity to get the process started.

Kate Cronin is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana and is a Masters Student at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House and the University of Rochester. Her work with the Huff Music Cue Sheet Collection is part of her capstone project for the Selznick School.

One of the neatest facets of the George Eastman Legacy Collection is the personal and business correspondence of George Eastman. Our vault contains 154 boxes of loose, incoming letters and 40 bound volumes containing Eastman’s outgoing letters in Letterpress format.

Over the years, hundreds of researchers have come to peruse Eastman’s letters as they researched his business sense, love for music, home and gardens, philanthropy, travels, and much more. In order to preserve the fragile Letterpress volumes and aid people in their research, two years ago we embarked upon an ambitious project: scanning the copies of George Eastman’s outgoing letters in high resolution so that they could eventually be OCR’d and thus be word searchable.

With the help of Kirtas Technologies and Iris Resources, the 40 bound volumes were carefully photographed. It was a tedious process as clean, white sheets of paper had to be put behind each thin, translucent page so the blue text could be legible. Once we had our hi-res images (each volume contained either 500 or 1,000 pages), an indispensable volunteer of ours, Peter Thomas, ran the images through Photoshop, getting rid of unneeded space and heightening the contrast so the text could be as easy to read as possible. Then he ran the images through Abbyy, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that “reads” the text and generates word-searchable PDFs.

While Peter spent months doing his part in Photoshop and Abbyy, some volunteers and I spent the same period typing up the handwritten indexes in the back of each volume that Eastman’s secretary, Alice K. Whitney, had created after wrapping up Eastman’s affairs. Now we have a complete, chronological index of every letter that Eastman wrote through his secretaries. (If Eastman personally handwrote a letter to someone, we wouldn’t have a copy – unless it’s been donated to us).

Now when a researcher asks if Eastman wrote to a particular person or company, I can quickly look their name up in our spreadsheet and see if and when Eastman corresponded with them. Getting the appropriate image number from that spreadsheet allows me to pull up the appropriate PDF(s) in seconds, saving time and preserving the original volumes.

Because of the nature of the often-blurry text on the thin paper, the OCR is not perfect. But we’re convinced we did the best we could with current technology available to us. At its best though, we can search the PDFs for particular words like Labrador or Brownie and find when Eastman talks about particular subjects.

We intend to make these searchable letters available online in a yet-to-be-determined format. Stay tuned.